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An epic music game with a great setlist. Possibly the best guitar hero yet.

People have thrown some bad comments at GH5, but it has some great features that set it apart from GHWT. One of the greatest new features is party play. It's great way for anyone to jump right into the song and start playing. Even in the middle of songs you can still start playing. It's an easy, and fun way to warm, or play with a group. There's no presure. If you're in red the song continues playing. If you don't want to play an instrument, you can also watch the band play in party play.

A notable part of the game is the great song list. Most of the songs aren't well know, but this allows for the player to experience new music. Playing a set list of songs you'ver heard a million times can take away from the games experience and purpose. Playing some of these lesser know songs gives you a chance to really prover your skills because you don't already know the beats and melodies.

Many people will enjoy the ability to make playlists. Not only can you make one time playlists, but you can also save a playlist to play whenever you chose. The game also comes with some preloaded playlists.

In career mode you need to earn stars to unlock venues. The more stars you earn per song the fast your career progresses, and you unlock venues. New to the GH line is the abitity to complete challenges for extra stars. Some challeges are instument and band specific, but all changes are optional. if you complete the challenge successfully you gain extra stars, and unlock new things in the game such as characters, and cheats. There are three levels of challenge completion: Gold, Platinum, and Diamond. You get an additional star as you move up each level, which means you can have up to eight stars on every song.

To put a truly authentic feel to things a player can customize their band logo, and characters. There are several options for making you logo and characters exactly the way you want them. You can customize everything from the shape and position of their eyes, to the emblems and colors of their instruments. You may find yourself spending hours just working on your characters look. Customize is one of the best features of the game.

Lastly if you enjoy creating your own music you can do that in the music studio. This is one of the things the truly got and upgrade from GHWT. It's now simpler to use, and has more options. If you're new to the music studio you will find the on screen descriptions and directions very helpful. You can also upload up to 50 songs instead of 5 now. Heavy GHtunes users will appreciate this.

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If you don't mind there being no improvements since GH4, you'll really enjoy this.

Since the release of Guitar Hero, many people have been rocking out with their plastic guitars. The first game was earth-shattering, although the novelty has worn off with releases like Rock Band.

Here is a background - Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2 was made by music video-game veterans Harmonix. They handed the Guitar Hero title to Neversoft, who had absolutely no experience in music games. The games by Neversoft, arguably, aren't as good as the first two games. Harmonix went on to make Rock Band, which has now become a rival to Guitar Hero. Neversoft had success with Guitar Hero 3 and Guitar Hero World Tour, although the many expansions to World Tour had lower sales than the main games, with many people complaining about the oversatuation of the music game market. Although Guitar Hero 5 has the '5' in it, there had been 12 Guitar Hero games altogether.

The gameplay is the same as previous GH games. There are five buttons on the guitar and you have to press the button and strum at the same time, corresponding to what comes up the 'highway' on the screen. You do not need to strum when the translucent notes come across the screen. On the easy difficulty, only three of the buttons - green, red and yellow - need to be pressed. On medium, the game includes the blue button. On hard and expert, all five buttons are included - green, red, yellow, blue and orange. There is also a beginner mode, introduced in World Tour, where strumming is only necessary. Many people find difficulty, even on easy. You soon get used to it. Next, there is the rock meter. This tells you how well you are doing. Red means you are not doing very good and if it gets to the bottom, you fail the song. Yellow means you are doing quite good and you start the song in the middle of the yellow. Green means you are doing very well. The scoring system rewards you depending on how well you are doing. You are rewarded 50 - 100 points at first (the difficulty changes your point count). When you get to ten hits in a row, you get 2X your score, when you get twenty hits you get to 3X and when you get to thirty hits you get 4X. Star power multiplies your current X number by 2. For example, if you are on 4X, you will be on 8X. This happens for a limited time. You will get this to happen by hitting all the notes in a sequence with glowing notes. It is activated by shaking the guitar controller or pressing the star power button.

The instruments are mostly reliable. The guitar periphal lasts a long time, although a button might not work after a while, or strumming may only work a certain way. The microphone is also good. It looks great, and probably the instrument you can count on to last. The drums are probably the ones that will last least. The cymbols might stop working after a while of use. The wires connected to them can also be annoying, as they could come out after you hit the cymbal. Overall, they are pretty good. The graphics have the same style as World Tour. They are pretty cartoony, but are fairly good. I think the graphical style could be changed a bit to make it a bit more realistic. The audience are still sillhouetes, which could be improved on. The Beatles Rock Band managed it, so I think this game should.

The multiplayer has potential to be good, but I cannot find anyone online. I haven't found anyone at all, through the many times I have tried. I can still get people on Guitar Hero 3, and that game is two years older! The problem seems to have occured since GH Metallica was released, with the matchmaking system. It would be great if you could find anyone.

The creation is very good. You can create your character, with very good detail and lots to choose from. You can choose the rocker's clothes, from a sleeved shirt to a cap of a brain. There is a lot of choice and is very creative. You can also create your instruments. The microphone creation isn't very good as you'd expect, but guitar, bass and drums are very comprehensive. You can choose the shape, paint and even put stickers on the instrument. You will not likely be disappointed by the creation on offer here.

It is a great game, and you should get it if you are a fan of music games.

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If you're just getting into the Guitar Hero games, get Guitar Hero: World Tour

Guitar Hero 5 was set to improve on Guitar Hero: World Tour and fix the little issues that had started to annoy people. I can honestly say that Guitar Hery 5 has succeeded in doing that, and yet I can't say I enjoy playing it very much - in fact, I've played it for only a few hours since buying it, and now it stays in it's case while Guitar Hero: World Tour has the privilege of actually staying in my Playstation 3.

This is because, quite honestly, the songs on Guitar Hero 5 just don't compare to those on GH:WT. I find myself playing the few good songs on GH5 over and over in "Quickplay" mode, just to avoid actually progressing in "Career" mode and having to play dozens of songs that I dislike. Whereas in GH:WT, I'm happy to play most songs, and there are a few on there that I truly love.

Setlist and songs aside, GH5 does do the job. There's the same Guitar Hero format and layout that we've come to know and love, with a new "Party" mode thrown in, where you can jump in and out of a song at any point and on any instrument. Personally, I never use this as I prefer to play the whole song, and you're bound to miss some of the song at the very beginning.

Online gaming is much the same as ever. And by that I mean that it's fun, unless you find yourself playing against a Guitar Hero master, who gets a score as high as the sky. Then it's not so fun. But that only happens occasionally, and in general you'll probably find yourself getting pretty competitive against a complete stranger who's probably half way across the world.

Overall, I would recommend getting Guitar Hero: World Tour, or even Guitar Hero III rather than Guitar Hero 5. Of course, this is based on my personal music taste, although I have found that several other people agree with me. So if you look at the Guitar Hero 5 setlist and find yourself amazed by the abundance of amazing songs, then go for it and buy it because you won't be disappointed. If, however, you haven't heard of a lot of stuff on there, then don't bother, because you probably won't be too impressed. I gave it a chance, and was disappointed - don't waste your money by making the same mistake.

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Who the Hell wants INDIE!?

The Guitar Hero series reinvented itself with the release of Guitar Hero: World Tour in late 2008, which attempted to capitalise on the success of their main competior, Rock Band, who had introduced drums and vocal play to the excellent guitar play established by the Guitar Hero games. Though not without its flaws, World Tour was a great game, yet the fifth game in the series doesn't really do anything to innovate the idea further and as a result this is the most underwhelming entry into the series so far, not aided by its fairly dull set list.

There are a few improvements, though; the clunky menus of the previous game have been fixed, meaning that players can jump in and out of play with just the click of a button, rather than having to navigate the awkward menus of the previous game. Also, the Career mode is a lot of fun even if it has been made a lot easier now, in that you needn't beat every song on a track list to advance. However, the game is plagued largely by the fundamentals, namely a disappointing track list that sees them going away from rock and metal music towards more trite, populist Indie fare, which serves to please the broad, casual fanbase while not bringing much to the table for dedicated fans.

That's not to say there aren't some classics on here, because there are, such as Iron Maiden's seminal 2 Minutes to Midnight, but in total there's only about a dozen metal songs out of an 85-song track list, and the vast majority of the songs are flavour-of-the-month indie and alternative rock such as Kings of Leon's Sex on Fire. This is compounded by the fact that the songs aren't very challenging as, of course, most Indie songs don't have any guitar solos and the riffs tend to be quite repetitive.

The gameplay is still great but a dodgy set list severely diminishes the fun.

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A great game to play with mates and on your own

Guitar Hero 5 is the latest installment of the Guitar Hero series which is great for playing with mates, either with all of the peripherals (guitar, drums, bass, microphone) or just with the guitar trying to beat your mates' scores. As with every game in this series the tracklist contains some great songs which you will enjoy playing along to, such as Smells Like Teen Spirit, Bleed American and Rock Show. Even some of the stranger selections (Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting, Superstition) are great to play and very enjoyable. You do get the sense of over familiarity if you have played any of the previous games but if it isn't broke there's no need to fix it and the sales of the Guitar Hero series throughout the series bears testament to that. I would highly recommend this game to people, regardless of whether you have played Guitar Hero or not in the past, or even if you have never picked up a guitar before as it is a great game to play both on your own or with a group of people.

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This is a real fun-time party game

Guitar Hero 5 (GH5) is published by Activision and is rated PG. You can play 1-4 players on one PS3 or up to 8 players online. the picture is output at 720P high definition, rather than the higher 1080P. I bought this version as the standalone game, as I already had a guitar controller (Les Paul).

The idea of the game is to play along to the music tracks, pressing the correct buttons and guitar strummer in time to the music. There on-screen graphics show you the performance and the notes you have to hits scroll down the screen. Throughout the various versions, not a lot has changed. However, each new game brings a new updated track listing.

There are a few changes on GH5, one of which is the Jump in/out feature of the Party Play mode. So you can easily let a friend jump in and play midway through a track. There is also a new RockFest mode where you test your skills against 4 local players or 8 online players. The graphics also seem a little more polished and fluid too.

This is a real fun-time party game. Anyone of any ability can have a go and not feel embarrassed. Highly recommended.